Despite receiving acclaim from both sides of the political spectrum over his stance against unconstitutional drone strikes, CNN host Erin Burnett and one of her guests suggested Senator Rand Paul was “wasting time” by staging his marathon filibuster yesterday.

Introducing the segment by remarking, “Senator Paul drones on….and on….and on,” Burnett asked former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if a drone strike could ever take place within the United States.

Vietor, who personally worked alongside presumptive CIA director John Brennan, one of the key architects of the secret drone program, attempted to claim the issue was “pretty simple” and that Attorney General Holder and President Obama had clearly stated that drones would not be used against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, the opposite of what Holder and Obama have actually communicated by refusing to categorically deny that this would take place.

Indeed, in his letter to Rand Paul, Holder said that it was “possible” under extraordinary circumstances that drones could be used to kill Americans domestically. This refusal to rule out drone strikes on U.S. soil completely was the very thing that prompted Paul to launch his 12 hour filibuster.

Vietor then ludicrously claimed Rand Paul’s filibuster of Brennan’s CIA confirmation was “harmful to national security,” adding “John Brennan does his job to save lives, whether they’re Americans or someone living in Yemen who’s threatened by Al-Qaeda, that’s why John Brennan does his job and he does it extraordinarily well,” complaining that Brennan was being “held up” by Paul’s filibuster.

The notion that John Brennan “does his job to save lives” of people living in countries like Yemen is like claiming that Christopher Dorner saved the lives of police officers by killing them.

Although the Obama administration claims the drone program has been used to carry out targeted killings of known terrorists and militants, almost 5,000 people have been killed in total, many of them innocent bystanders, including at least 176 children.

On average, 50 innocent people are killed for every suspected “terrorist” who dies in a drone strike. That means 98 per cent of people killed by the drone strikes overseen by Brennan are harmless civilians. According to Vietor, John Brennan is ‘saving lives’ by ordering drone strikes that kill thousands of innocent people.

CNN’s coverage of the event was typical of other network news organizations. Despite setting Twitter on fire, the mainstream media was noticeably less interested in Paul’s mammoth filibuster. As one YouTube user explained, even as the Kentucky Senator was into his 12th hour, major news websites buried the story near the bottom of their front pages.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a host for Infowars Nightly News.